Jim Allister

I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the Windsor Framework on parcel deliveries across the Irish Sea. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. Tomorrow, 1 May, the noose of the Irish sea border will tighten even further in respect of business in Northern Ireland. We already have the red lane Irish sea border, subject to the full complement of EU requirements, through which all raw materials for our businesses have to pass. We also have what was called the green lane, which has been renamed but otherwise little about it has changed, for the passage of other goods; we have a business-to-consumer border for parcels; and now—in some ways the most threatening because of the scale of the businesses that will be affected—we have the business-to-business parcel border. Of course, that is a border partitioning the supposed United Kingdom and its supposed internal market. The essence of an internal market is that goods move unfettered and unchecked between and within all parts of it. We now have something else, courtesy of the absurd protocol—or, as we now call it, the Windsor framework. In view of the fact that that decreed that we in Northern Ireland are subject to the EU’s customs code, which in turn decrees that Great Britain is a third or foreign country, we now have the absurdity of various dimensions of border for the passage of goods from GB to Northern Ireland. For 200 years, the Northern Ireland economy has been intensely integrated with the GB economy, particularly in manufacturing. It was always the northern part of Ireland that had the big manufacturing sectors. Therefore, the integration, in particular with regard to the supply of raw materials, has been pivotal and GB has been the primary source of all that. Now, parcels will be subject to rigorous EU requirements, including the requirement for a commodity code—